Fall 2005

Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Richard Rorty is a philosopher, literary critic, and political theorist. 

Emma Rothschild is the Director of the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University, and specializes in the history of economic thought.

Professor Bergdoll's broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany between 1750 and 1900. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of nineteenth-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in nineteenth-century European society.

Diarmuid Costello specializes in post-Kantian Continental aesthetics, the philosophy of art, and theories of art and photography.

Patricia Dailey specializes in medieval literature and culture (English, Dutch, French, and Italian) and critical theory, focusing on women's mystical texts, visions, Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose, medieval rhetoric, hermeneutics, and theology.

Professor de Bary's scholarly work has focused on the major religious and intellectual traditions of East Asia, especially Confucianism in China, Japan, and Korea. He began his career as a teacher at Columbia in 1949 when he undertook to develop the undergraduate general education program in East Asian Studies.

Art historian, art critic and literary critic, Michael Fried is J.R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and Art History at Johns Hopkins University. In his work, Fried engages questions of modernism, realism, theatricality, objecthood, self-portraiture, embodiedness, and the everyday.